Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Christianity and War THERE are two disheartening features in the attitude of Americans toward the ruthless war which has been waged in Europe for the past two years. One is the materialism of pacifists who ignore, and have steadily ignored, the crucial question of right and wrong, justice and injustice. The other is the materialism of pious Christians who lament the failure of Christianity to reconcile the irreconcilable, to preserve the long-threatened security of nations. When, at the request of President Wilson, the first Sunday of October, 1914, was set aside as a day of prayer for peace, — a day of many sermons and of many speeches, — prayers and sermons and speeches all alluded to the war as though it were the cholera or the plague, something simple of issue, the abatement of which would mean people getting better, the cure of which would mean people getting well. The possibility of a peace shameful to justice and disastrous to civilization was carefully ignored. The truth that death is better than a surrender of all that makes life morally worth the living, was never spoken. This may be what neutrality implies. We addressed the Almighty in guarded language lest He should misunderstand our position. We listened respectfully when Secretary Bryan told us that our first duty was to use what influence we might have to hasten the return of peace, without asking him to be more explicit, to say what on earth he would have had us do, and how — without moving hand or foot — he would have had us do it. Since then, men of little faith have kept dinning in our ears that religion is eclipsed, that Gospel law lacks the substance of a dream, that Christian principles are bankrupt in the hour of need, that the only God now worshipped in Europe is the tribal God who fights for his o... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.